ALSO BY GAYLE FORMAN I Have Lost My Way Leave Me I Was Here Just One Night Just One Year Just One Day Where She Went If I Stay Sisters in Sanity VIKING An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York First published in the United States of America by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2021 Copyright © 2021 by Gayle Forman Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader. Viking & colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC. Visit us online at penguinrandomhouse.com. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA IS AVAILABLE. Ebook ISBN 9780425290828 Design by Rebecca Aidlin Illustrations by Anna Rupprecht This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content. pid_prh_5.7.0_c0_r0 For the Heathers, the Kathleens, the Mitchells, the Beckys, and all the booksellers, who give us a great good place. CONTENTS Cover Also by Gayle Forman Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs Too Loud a Solitude Sometimes a Great Notion The Rules The Giving Tree Peanuts Gone Girl A Wrinkle in Time Just Kids When You Reach Me The Scent of Desire Fight Club The Little Book of Hygge The Art of the Deal Goldmine Record Album Price Guide Beethoven’s Anvil The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Starting and Running a Coffee Bar Tuesdays with Morrie Moby-Dick Moneyball The Big Book The 2010 Rand McNally Road Atlas The Magician’s Nephew A Grief Observed My Brother The Great Good Place Stone Soup Bibliography Addiction Note Acknowledgments About the Author A town isn’t a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it’s got a bookstore, it knows it’s not foolin’ a soul. —Neil Gaiman, American Gods Every act of creation begins with an act of destruction. —Pablo Picasso Home is where I want to be, but I guess I’m already there. —Talking Heads, “This Must Be the Place” The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs They say it took the dinosaurs thirty-three thousand years to die. Thirty-three millennia from the moment the asteroid slammed into the Yucatán Peninsula to the day that the last dinosaur keeled over, starving, freezing, poisoned by toxic gases. Now, from a universal perspective, thirty-three thousand years is not much. Barely a blink of an eye. But it’s still thirty-three thousand years. Almost two million Mondays. It’s not nothing. The thing I keep coming back to is: Did they know? Did some poor T-rex feel the impact of the asteroid shake the earth, look up, and go, Oh, shit, that’s curtains for me? Did the camarasaurus living thousands of miles from the impact zone notice the sun darkening from all that ash and understand its days were numbered? Did the triceratops wonder why the air suddenly smelled so different without knowing it was the poison gases released by a blast that was equivalent to ten billion atomic bombs (not that atomic bombs had been invented yet)? How far into that thirty-three-thousand-year stretch did they go before they understood that their extinction was not looming—it had already happened? The book I’m reading, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs by Steve Brusatte, which I discovered mis-shelved with atlases a few months back, has a lot to say on what life was like for dinosaurs. But it doesn’t really delve into what they were thinking toward the end. There’s only so much, I guess, you can conjecture about creatures that lived sixty million years ago. Their thoughts on their own extinction, like so many other mysteries, they took with them. Fact: Dinosaurs still exist. Here’s what they look like. A father and son in a failing used bookstore, spending long, aimless days consuming words no one around here buys anymore. The father, Ira, sits reading in his usual spot, a ripped upholstered chair, dented from years of use, in the maps section, next to the picture window that’s not so picturesque anymore with its Harry Potter lightning-bolt crack running down the side of it. The son—that’s me, Aaron—slumps on a stool by the starving cash register, obsessively reading about dinosaurs. The shelves in the store, once so tidy and neat, spill over, the books like soldiers in a long-lost war. We have more volumes now than we did when we were a functioning bookstore because whenever Ira sees a book in the garbage or recycling bin, or on the side of the road, he rescues it and brings it home. We are a store full of left-behinds. The morning this tale begins, Ira and I are sitting in our usual spots, reading our usual books, when an ungodly moan shudders through the store. It sounds like a foghorn except we are in the Cascade mountains of Washington State, a hundred miles from the ocean or ships or foghorns. Ira jumps up from his seat, eyes wide and panicky. “What was that?” “I don’t—” I’m drowned out by an ice-sharp crack, followed by the pitiful sounds of books avalanching onto the floor. One of our largest shelves has split down the middle, like the chestnut tree in Jane Eyre. And anyone who’s read Jane Eyre knows what that portends. Ira races over, kneeling down, despondent as he hovers over the fallen soldiers, as if he’s the general who led them to their deaths. He’s not. This is not his fault. None of it. “I got this,” I tell him in the whispery voice I’ve learned to use when he gets agitated. I lead him back to
